Adobe Flash
Silktide checks your pages for embedded Adobe Flash content. Flash was once widely used for animation, video, and interactive content, but it has been discontinued and no modern browser can play it.
Adobe officially ended support for Flash on 31 December 2020, and every major browser has since removed the ability to run it. Any Flash still embedded in your pages is dead weight: visitors see a blank space or a broken plugin placeholder where the content should be.
Why this matters
Flash content on a modern website simply does not work. Visitors get an empty box instead of your video, animation, or interactive tool, usually with no explanation. The content is also invisible to search engines and , and leftover Flash usually marks a page nobody has reviewed in years - which tends to mean other problems too.
How to fix it
- Find what each flagged Flash object was: a video, an animation, a game, a navigation menu.
- Replace it with a modern equivalent - video with an
<video>element or a hosted video service, animations with CSS or , interactive content with standard web technology. - If the content is obsolete, remove the embed entirely rather than leaving a broken placeholder.
<!-- Broken: Flash object no browser can play -->
<object type="application\/x-shockwave-flash" data="intro.swf"></object>
<!-- Fixed: standard HTML video -->
<video src="intro.mp4" controls></video>
How Silktide tests this
- Load each HTML page in a real web browser.
- Look for
<object>elements that declare the Flash content type (application\/x-shockwave-flash). - If none are found, also look for the legacy embedding pattern of a
<param name="movie">referencing a.swffile, which some very old pages used on its own. - Report each Flash element found, with its location in the page.